NYC considers ban on e-cigarettes because its officials are addicted to power

In places like California’s San Rafael City, it is now illegal to smoke in your own home. Because New York City officials can’t be outdone by the west coast’s bureaucratic robber barons — and because they’re addicted to power — they’ve moved on to controlling the lives of those who use e-cigarettes. How weird will it be when they go after candy cigarettes down the road?

The real problem with e-cigarettes, according to [New York City Health Commissioner Thomas Farley] and other supporters of the ban, is that they look too much like the real thing. “E-cigarettes threaten, in my opinion, to undermine enforcement of the Smoke-Free Air Act,” City Council Speaker Christine Quinn said last week. “Because many of the e-cigarettes are designed to look like cigarettes and be used just like them, they can lead to confusion or confrontation.”

You might think that people of ordinary intelligence would pretty quickly learn to distinguish a burning stick of dried vegetable matter from an e-cigarette, which contains no tobacco and produces no smoke. And once they learned the difference, they could explain it to the New York City Council. “These are being touted as safer than cigarettes,” says Councilman James Gennaro, “but we don’t really know that.”

So now it’s okay to work on banning people from activities that look dangerous. It’s okay to ban activities that state planners fear might lead to “confusion” or “confrontation.” When do the bans on toy guns begin?

Where does it end? Answer: It doesn’t.

To the elitist mastermind, you are too dumb to be trusted with sodium consumption. You are too dumb to decide how much soda to drink in a single sitting. You are too dumb to decide how much water your toilet uses per flush and what kind of light bulbs you use in your home. You are too dumb to decide which health care plans are best for you — particularly if you’re young and healthy and only want a package that only includes catastrophic coverage. In the quest to create heaven on earth, officials addicted to the task create hellish fiefdoms all over the globe.

The reason why the compulsive do-gooder is so dangerous is because his regulations come in drips and drops over time. Whether you liken it to Chinese water torture or death by 10,000 paper cuts the results are the same — a slow death. Ironically, the bureaucratic busybody’s endless attempts to prevent individuals from harming themselves only hastens the death of free nations.

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I'm a former Army guy who believes success comes through hard work, honesty, optimism, and perseverance.
I believe seeing yourself as a victim creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. I believe in God. I'm a USC Trojan with an MA in Political Science from American University.

Ugh. These statist clowns don’t know when to quit, do they? Smoking in your old home is illegal in San Rafael City?! Yeesh. That’s going way too far. I love how they assume we’re too damn stupid to make our decisions and they have to do it for us. It’s also funny how they think they can dictate to us what to put in our bodies when it comes to food/drugs/cigarettes/alcohol but these same idiots are the ones who scream, “Don’t tell me what to do with my body!” when it comes to a thing called abortion.

Merry Christmas, by the way. Hope you and your wife had a safe trip to Montana.

Liberals support freedom of choice. Can you choose to smoke? No. Can you choose to buy a soft drink in a container larger than 16 ounces? No. Can you choose to opt out of Social Security and invest in a private pension plan? No. Can you choose to own a firearm? LOL. So what can you choose to do? You can choose to have an abortion. Whoopee.

If you’re a church in a state that has allowed same-sex marriages, are you allowed to freely practice your religion and tell the couple to kindly piss off and find some other church who takes a more liberal interpretation of the bible than neo-libs take with the constitution? Are you allowed to tell them that they can get all the tax-payer supported benefits of marriage directly from the state via civil unions instead of having to go to some place that most likely doesn’t like your coupling and forcing them to say, against said place’s own conscience, that a power that you probably don’t even believe in but they they do, condones said coupling?

If the answer isn’t a ‘clear’ no, believe me, it soon will be. All it will take is one rainbow brigadier couple suing and voila.

I agree that it’s only a matter of time before some Christian church gets sued for refusing to perform a gay wedding. It’s already happened in England, even though the law legalizing gay marriage specifically said that churches could not be forced to perform such ceremonies.

I agree that it’s probably going to happen sooner or later. I’m against gay “marriage,” but I’m for civil unions in which they get all the same benefits. That way you don’t have to redefine the traditional view of marriage and you respect the religious freedom of those who are against it.

I wonder if Bloomberg and his minions is be a fan of moonbat columnist Josh Barro, who thinks that ordinary people are too stupid to make decisions on their own and that the government should do that for them. Obama is a fan of Barro’s, not surprisingly:

Answer:“So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can … it’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.”

That’s a foolish thing for him to say. If the EPA wants to limit the amount of toxins released through a coal-powered smokestack and liquid coolant exhaust pipes, that’s protecting the citizenry, but the government taxing the plants for CO2 to quite literally put them out of business… yikes!

Did you know that sex toys are illegal in Alabama? I find it odd the things people want to regulate or tax. Sometimes, I think there are some good reasons for limited regulations and taxes, but most of the time it’s coercion of the citizenry or worse.

So, in Alabama, you can own an AR-15, but not a vibrator? And in New York, you can have an abortion, but not a 20-ounce soda? There are would-be dictators on both the right and left who want to impose their sensibilities on us. Their motives are pure, of course. We are all idiots who need to be protected from ourselves.

Wow, I didn’t know that sex toys were illegal in Alabama, but then again I’m not the type of person who goes out and buys that kind of stuff. Here in MN the owner of a head shop in Duluth (it was a front-page local story for a while) was sent to prison recently for selling illegal synthetic drugs….. that weren’t illegal at the time he was selling them. He’s fighting his conviction right now.

It’s hard to have a lot of sympathy for a sleazy head shop owner, but that case in Duluth could set a dangerous precedent. If a person can be convicted for doing something that was legal at the time he did it, then it would open the door to a lot of malicious prosecutions and frivolous lawsuits. A state could ban so-called “assault weapons,” then prosecute or sue a sporting goods dealer who sold AR-15 rifles before the ban. The US Constitution prohibits ex post facto laws, but it seems that hysteria and political correctness trump the Constitution.